Well, we're back home and having major Europe withdrawal. We absolutely loved our trip to London and Paris! I wanted to blog about our trip so that I can remember every detail that was magical and wonderful to me, so here we go! We landed in London around 9am on Monday morning. As soon as I landed I knew I liked London. There were adorable small grocery stores in the airport with fresh flowers and even the toilet signs were cute. We checked into our airbnb around noon (p.s. all our airbnbs were wonderful and I would highly recommend them!) and then went out to start exploring. Except, we had no idea how to get around. We took about an hour just to figure out what bus or tube station to take us to where we needed to go. It definitely takes a little time to get your bearings in a new city. By this time we were starving for lunch so we stopped in at a little pub we found called The Edgar Wallace.
This was one of our best spontaneous decisions of the trip! Our waitress, Janet, was a hilarious and kind British lady who made us feel so welcome. Joe and I got the sausage and mash, which was delicious, and my parents got the fish and chips. Janet also recommended a beer for Joe to try and it was his favorite of the whole trip.
After finishing up lunch, we walked over to Millenium Bridge and then took a bus over to the Tower of London. Unfortunately, we ran into heavy traffic and by the time we got there, it was 30 minutes until closing. Our tickets were good for 7 days, thankfully! Since we had time we headed over to Parliament and Westminster Abbey to walk around and take some photos.
We had tickets for the London Eye that night so we decided we had better start heading there since we didn't know our way around yet. This is also a good time to mention that there aren't many public bathrooms to use in Europe and a lot of them have you pay to use them. We walked all over trying to find one near the London Eye. For the rest of the trip, anytime we were near a free one we took advantage! For dinner, we went to The Sherlock Holmes Pub. Joe and I split pulled pork sliders and fries. This place was just ok and I wouldn't recommend it even though it looks cool.
At sunset, we got on the London Eye and rotated above London for half an hour. This was a great activity to get to see all of London.
Tuesday was our day trip to bath. We took a train and got to Bath around 9am. As we stepped out of the train station, we all knew we had made the right choice for a daytrip. Bath has small winding streets with historic buildings and a feeling of Jane Austen in the air.
We walked into the first cafe we saw, Cafe Au Lait, and had coffees and pastries. My pain au chocolat here was my favorite of the whole trip (yes, even above paris!). We headed directly to the Roman Baths after this and really enjoyed walking through and hearing the history of the place. We even tried the water at the end!
Next, we walked along the Royal Crescent (which felt like Elizabeth Bennet could walk up to me at any time) and explored some shops.
My favorite shop was a tiny bookstore called Bath Old Books. I fell in love with a 1st edition Mansfield Park that was a light blue with gold embossing. Sadly it was much too expensive, so I settled for browsing all the beautiful books instead.
I also loved this little shop full of antique sewing machines in the display window!
We ate lunch at the Bath Brewhouse. We got chicken caesar sliders that were top notch.
After thoroughly exploring Bath, we took the train back to London and rested a little. For dinner we went to Smollensky's Bar and Grill. This was an ok restaurant but we liked that it was one block down from our theater to see Funny Girl.
When we sat down in the theater, we noticed little binoculars in front of us which you could rent for the show. I loved this little detail and also the fact that they had little ice creams you could get during intermission!
This marks the end of the first part of our trip (we went back to London after Paris). In the next post I'll talk about what we did in Paris and then finish up with a third post talking about the rest of our time in London.